Short Abstract

This paper reexamines a IJA manual often cited as authorizing the execution of Chinese POWs before the Nanjing Massacre. Using archival context, it argues that this view is overstated. Instead, it marked a step in a longer process that eroded legal restraint and expanded punitive discretion.

Long Abstract

The Nanjing Massacre (December 1937–March 1938) remains one of the gravest mass atrocities perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese Army. A crucial component of the violence was a deliberate policy adopted by senior officers of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army—one of the two main forces advancing on Nanjing—to deny quarter to Chinese prisoners of war, refuse to accept surrender, and actively pursue and kill former Chinese soldiers who had shed their uniforms and attempted to pass as civilians.

Scholars have frequently linked this policy to a 1933 Japanese military manual, which is often described as granting Japanese troops broad discretion to execute captured Chinese soldiers. Yet the manual itself remains largely inaccessible outside Japanese archives and has never been digitized or published in full. As a result, much of the existing historiography relies on a narrow set of frequently recycled excerpts, cited repeatedly across the literature with little contextual analysis.

This paper forms part of a broader research project that reexamines the 1933 manual within its full institutional, legal, and historical setting. It argues that the text did not constitute an explicit or unrestricted “license to kill.” Rather, it should be understood as a key moment in a longer process, one that began during the Russo-Japanese War, in which formal legal regimes governing prisoners of war were gradually supplanted by expanding operational discretion. I conceptualize this shift as the “banditization of warfare”: a framework that blurred the distinction between lawful combatants and criminal enemies, normalized punitive violence, and laid critical groundwork for the mass killing of prisoners and civilians at Nanjing.